Windows Desktop Search (MS Search) 3.0 is built into Windows Vista. If you run Office 2007 on Windows XP and want to use the nifty features for searching, you will need to install the app. At the Vista launch, we got a nice showcase of this application. The Mac user next to me announced, “That’s insane”, which I take to mean that it is not a feature found in Mac OSX.

You can install Windows Desktop Search on a Windows 2000. You need Windows XP to use the preview feature. You need Outlook or Outlook express from 2000 or later to index emails. The program builds an index of the files on a user's hard drive. The initial creation of this index can take up to several hours. Once the index is complete, Windows Desktop Search returns search results almost instantaneously. Searches are performed not only on file names, but also on the contents and tags of a file. The indexing process is similar to other commercial content management indexing, which previously had only been available on specialized content services systems like FileNet. The indexing process not only looks at text content, but also at folder and subfolder names. So if you have stored your family pictures by year and location, you could easily find Disneyland / 2005 / teacup ride / vomit.

Users of Windows XP can freely download and install Windows Desktop Search from Microsoft. Most of the competing desktop search programs, Copernic, Yahoo, and Google are also free.